Oculog is a new system for performing electronic music where a video-based eye movement system is used to control the sound. The work of Juno Kim, Greg Schiemer and Terumi Narushima, all of the University of Wollongong, Australia, Oculog was presented as a paper at the NIME 2007 conference. It is a project in progress.

Musical control, traditionally dependent on and conditioned by the muscular responses of performers who hold and touch their instruments, is here expanded to include electronically sensed choreographed music. Oculog is not the first to use biological signals – you can read about earlier efforts in Kim, Schiemer and Narushima’s paper, “Oculog: Playing with Eye Movements” presented at the NIME 2007 conference. Continue reading

Bio-tracking is a mobile phone based exhibition using GPS (Global Positioning System) and a leading edge new smart phone software (suitable for Nokia Series 60) called Socialight downloadable via www.socialight.com which enabled the placement of virtual sticky notes around various locations in Brighton. The exhibition was part of Brighton Photo Biennial Fringe in 2007. Visitors could download the software and wander around the sites receiving text messages, sound files and images straight to their phones, in fact due to the nature of Socialight the exhibition is still live and can be viewed now.

Anna Dumitriu sampled and cultured various locations in the city of Brighton for normal flora bacteria and moulds, revealing this incredible, unseen and sublime world to us through a series of beautifully enhanced digital micrographs. Luciana Haill, Ian Helliwell, Ollie Glass and Juliet Kac created a series of sound works to accompany the images. Microbiologist John Paul wrote scientific text descriptions of the microbes. Continue reading

UCLA molecular biologists have turned protein sequences into original compositions of classical music, an article in Science News Weekly reports.

Rie Takahashi and Jeffrey H Miller of the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Molecular Genetics and the Molecular Biology Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, have converted genome-encoded protein sequences into musical notes to reveal auditory patterns without compromising musicality.

“We assigned a chord to each amino acid,” said Rie Takahashi, a UCLA research assistant and an award-winning, classically trained piano player. “We want to see if we can hear patterns within the music, as opposed to looking at the letters of an amino acid or protein sequence. We can listen to a protein, as opposed to just looking at it.”

A music clip of the human ThyA protein based on the single note assignment of one amino acid per musical note Continue reading

Architecture of the Air: The Sound and Light Environments of Christopher Janney by Beth Dunlop and Christopher Janney with a foreword by Sir George Martin.

Christopher Janney is one of the most prolific and influential artists working with sound and light today. Named by Esquire magazine in 1984 as one of the Americans under 40 most likely to change the world, Janney’s innovative use of recorded and live sound, light, and interactive technology has done much since to bear out that prediction. The majority of Janney’s work is in the public sphere, and is appropriately populist, often turning spectators into participants and (sometimes unwittingly) into musicians. All are at the nexus of art, technology, and music. Continue reading

Miya Masaoka is a musician, composer and performance artist. She has created works for koto, laser interfaces, laptop and video and written scores for ensembles, chamber orchestras and mixed choirs. In her performance pieces she has investigated the sound and movement of insects, as well as the physiological responses of plants, the human brain, and her own body.

Helen Thorington: Miya, you were trained in Japanese court music as well as contemporary music and I understand have expanded on the playing techniques of the koto – first by using extended techniques, but more importantly, by building a Laser Koto. For those who don’t know, can you tell us about the koto and how you developed it? What is the Laser Koto and how does it work?

Miya Masaoka: Sometimes various events, thoughts and inspiration converge in particular ways, and evolve over a period of time, I would say this was the case for the Laser Koto. For many years I had been trying to develop ways of extending the koto electronically –and continue to do so— and along these lines I was an aritist in residence at STEIM in Amsterdam and worked with Matt Wright at CNMAT to develop ways of building an interface for real time processing and sampling using gestural controllers and other ways of capturing and modifying sound. We recorded and mapped 900 koto samples that could be accessed in various ways. Continue reading

Bacterial Orchestra is a self-organizing evolutionary musical organism made of audio cells. Every cell - consisting of microphone and a loudspeaker - listens to its surroundings and picks up sounds trying to play them back in sync with what it hears. It can be the background noise, people talking or sound played by other cells. Every cell is simple, but together they create a complex whole. Continue reading

The Heart Chamber Orchestra is a one-hour performance that literally creates music “from the heart”. The orchestra consists of 12 classical musicians of the Trondheim Sinfonietta and the artist duo TERMINALBEACH (made of Pure and Erich Berger.) Using their heartbeats, the musicians control a computer composition and visualization environment. Continue reading

How two groups of scientists coax music from nature

“From Led Zeppelin to Wolf Parade, rock music owes a debt to science-and to the scientists whose fascination with sound art spurred them to create new noises. A Russian physicist named Leon Theremin developed the world’s first electronic musical instrument: a box with antennae (appropriately called a “theremin”) that used electric circuits to create a range of otherworldly sounds. Four decades later, in 1964, an engineering physics Ph.D. named Robert Moog invented the synthesizer that bears his name. Now, a new generation of scientists and musicians continue to push the frontiers of musical possibility. Continue reading

BrainWaves is a musical performance by cultured cortical cells interfacing with multielectrode arrays. Eight electrodes recorded neural patterns that were filtered to eight speakers after being sonified by robotic and human interpretation. Sound patterns followed neural spikes and waveforms, and also extended to video, with live visualizations of the music and neural patterns in front of a mesmerized audience. Teams from two research labs designed and engineered the project; read more from collaborator Gil Weinberg. Continue reading

Neural Sounds

BrainWaves is a project of complex systems’ data representation, like the human brain, developed at the Georgia Tech University by the students of neural engineering (prof. Steve Potter). The experiment is based upon the application of some pattern recognition techniques (through these techniques data - or patterns - are classified basing on a previous knowledge, or basing on statistical data retrieved from the patterns themselves), and it’s inspired by our brain ability of perceiving and distinguish different audio samples. The neural activity (in a neuron’s cultivation) subjected to sound stimulations is recorded through a series of electrodes and then played through eight speakers. The endeavor is of give a spatial propagation representation of the electric pulses into the cultivation. Moreover eight controllers allows an interaction with the neurons, simulating the pulse propagation starting from different cultivation points. The experiment is presented as an interactive music performance, and the aim of BrainWaves is not only to understand neurons’ activities but also to construct a musical ‘product’ with its own aesthetic significance. - Vito Campanelli, NEURAL.